SWEET ON FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

Pygmalion, better known for its 1956 Broadway musical title, My Fair Lady, released as a George Cukor Oscar-winning film in 1964, is the brainchild acclaimed author and linguistic activist, George Bernard Shaw, the foremost proponent of English spelling reform in the early 1900s. His most famous quote reads, “The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like,” but it goes on to even more interesting affirmations in the current context of language use and policy. “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play.“ Using these excerpts introducing phonetics professor Henry Higgins from the Preface to Pygmalionas a jumping off point, this talk will trace the relation between mother tongue and innovations in English L2 learning with respect to phonetics and spelling, inevitably revealing the character and contributions of Henry Sweet and Harold Palmer, reviewing the premises of the proposed reform and highlighting the historical implications and effects today in light of the Portuguese spelling reform (Acordo Ortográfico). Understanding the context of the Oral Method, for example, allows for greater understanding of innovation in today's mutlidimensional world of teaching and learning foreign languages while spelling reform has long captured the hearts of proponents who dream of a more consistent and phonetic approach.